Summer Reading and Viewing

  ..Stuff to read and watch if you care about... 

Speaking engagements were hard to come by over the summer but there is no shortage of resources to learn more about what's happening in reproductive justice and health care reform.  Here are my top recommendations, most of which are available to stream for free online or check out from the library.

..Reproductive Justice...

The Texas Tribune's Video Series: Fertile Ground

For a comprehensive look at the impact of political games being played with Texas's Women's Health Program. After the SCOTUS ruling, it is still under siege. This 6-part series explains what happened with family planning funding and abortion restrictions during the last Texas legislative session. Data and numbers should give you a good idea of what's at stake.

Rachel Maddow's MSNBC Documentary: The Assassination of Dr. Tiller

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Preview available here. If you subscribe to Netflix streaming service, you can find Rachel Maddow's profile of the political circumstances and events leading up to the day in 2009 when the late-term abortion provider was shot to death in his church. Dr. Tiller's simple explanation of why he chose to perform late-term abortions is an especially profound moment. The documentary also exposes the conditions that have forged a culture of terrorism against abortion clinics and providers.

.. America's Broken Health Care System...

These resources may be a bit dated but give a well-rounded overview of what makes the current model unsustainable. Examining other health care systems around the world gives insight into what we can and cannot accomplish going forward.

Frontline's Sick Around America

Frontline tours the nation talking to patients and representatives from the health insurance industry to answer the question: what's wrong with health care in America?  The insurance industry speaks for itself in this piece and they seem surprisingly on-board with reform. Frontline also produced a series about health care around the world, I haven't got around to watching yet.

Helene Jorgensen's 2008 book Sick & Tired: How America's Health Care System Fails Its Patients

This is personal story about one woman who contracted lyme disease and her battle to afford her medical bills and stay sane doing it. She open's with the story of Nikki White, which is also mentioned in the Frontline documentary. Jorgensen short, but well-researched volume highlights what I see as one of the biggest problems with the current system: conflicts of interest at nearly every level of health care delivery.

The Healing of America by T.R. Reid

I am late to the game on this bestseller from 2010, but, like the Frontline piece, it tours health care systems around the world, many of which serve as models for systems we already use, like Medicare and the V.A. health service. The book leaves you with the haunting question: how much inequity are we willing to tolerate when it comes to healthcare?

...Well, I hope this list helps to kill the last few hours before school starts up again. Many of the issues touched-upon will be big election-year talking points so we should all keep well-informed...
  

Objectivist Talk: Pro-Choice = Pro-Life

Dr. Andrew Bernstein brings Objectivism to the abortion debate.... We weren't sure what to expect. (Liz, you shoulda been there)

-By Megan Antonetti-Elford

On April 11, 2012, UT’s Objectivism Society welcomed Dr. Andrew Bernstein, author and  instructor of Philosophy at SUNY Purchase on the subject of a woman’s right to have an abortion. Objectivism follows the philosophy outlined in the writings of  Russian-American author Ayn Rand and is based on her ideas of an individualistic connection with reality and laissez-faire capitalism.

Dr. Bernstein’s hour-long discussion, which depended heavily on the semantics of the debate, chipped away at the issue from many angles often pitting objectivist-style nature as biology against views based on religious sentiment. He began with a dispute about the anti-choice’s use of the phrase “right-to-life.” In essence, he argued that life, defined by ‘individuation’ and independence could only be attributed to a woman in this context and not to “a growth inside a woman’s body.”

Throughout, he drew upon the ancient western philosophy of Aristotle and Plato and popular anti-abortion writers to articulate the misgivings of some of the anti-choice’s most characteristic arguments including:

• abortion is murder and should be outlawed

• a fetus is human from the moment of conception and should be granted all rights given to other humans

• evidence that a fetus is a human is that a fetus is a living being and has the genetic material of a human being

These were followed by quite rigorous and amusing counterarguments from the objectivist point of view - citing, in basic principle, that the “the acorn is not the oak” -a point, I think, that many pro-choicers get.

Though this well-cited succinct outline was of great value to understanding where anti-choice ideas come from, Bernstein’s uncertainty about the morality of later term abortions (after the first trimester) and minors’ right to abortion seemed to be a great disappointment to the audience.

What could be gathered about the objectivist argument for the right to abortion is that this particular right simply falls under the category of rights in general; that is, pro-choice = choice. Tacking on modifiers that it is a right only before certain moments in pregnancy or only to people above a certain age certainly muddled the philosophical purity of the task at hand with its arbitrariness.

Dr. Bernstein went on to cite his apparent disdain for many of the national services that by restricting choice, aim to alleviate injustice, and help the poor and disadvantaged in society- programs paid for with taxes such as environmental protection and health care aid.  These points were probably lost on anyone who does not value people based on the “effort” that they are capable of exerting to survive everyday American life. Additionally, if you are someone who does not feel that paying taxes places you under “involuntary servitude” to the state, you would have shifted in your chair as well. And so Bernstein spent the last part of his talk disparaging government policy in general, pointing out that both liberals and conservatives want to control the lives of individuals and only fight about how much control they should have and in which areas of life.

In my view, a genuine pro-choice stance is far simpler and less far-reaching than the one Dr. Bernstein outlines. Countless anecdotal evidence, especially in the context of abortion, shows that the treatment of moral dilemmas is not reducible to a list of philosophical maxims. Still, that shouldn’t stop us from framing our opinions and fighting for them. Medical abortion should be safe and available to any woman without stigma. And being pro-choice is simply being willing to defend and trust a woman to make this decision for herself.